I came across Amiga Music Preservation yesterday, and today I used the opportunity to grab some files by the two big computer music heroes I remember from my childhood: Mahoney and Kaktus (Pex Tufvesson and Anders Berkeman). While I was there I noticed another one, Jogeir Liljedahl, who I know comes from my hometown. I almost laughed out loud when I saw that he had written a piece about "Myrstad Mathus"!
It's great to have the music of my childhood avaliable like that. It's sure to invoke nostalgia, but perhaps some of the music has stood the test of time?
It's strange to see how these people have made the transition from subculture heroes into obscurity. The change must have been dramatic - Pex "Mahoney" Tufvesson, for instance, writes that he has a huge pile of fan mail from that period, so much that he hasn't opened it all.
Some act as if nothing was changed, some try to document the history of their movement. Some, like Anders Berkeman, leave only the tiniest hints on their pages that yes, that was me with the mods. Some even have managed to make a career out of it, but it's of course nothing like their former fame.
Some are dead. Another one from my hometown apparently died after a brief admission to a mental hospital. It's a bit alarming that I can find out that just by googling... But at least the memory of "Bug" lives on in one of many people who listened to his music when we were young.
When I look at the pages mentioning them, I see that most of them were part of cracker groups. They were also music, demo and graphics art groups, of course, but some of those groups there were razzias against... It definitely paints a complex picture of the culture. Is it any wonder I was disappointed when I read The cathedral and the bazaar, and found out that Eric Raymond dismissed the entire world I grew up with with a few contemptuous phrases?
Posted by vintermann at March 1, 2006 02:37 PM